The Receptionist (22 page)

A R
ENAISSANCE
M
AN

S
OME MONTHS AFTER MY
return from Greece, Bernard Taper’s wife, Phyllis, recommended the psychoanalyst Daniel Kaplowitz to me and got me into treatment. Kaplowitz had been trained in eclectic therapy of the Erik Erikson type. In addition to his private practice, he served in high office at one of the New York psychoanalytic associations. A tall, ruggedly handsome man, with a basketball player’s height and physique (he was an All-American guard in college at Long Island University), he combined eminence in his field with domestic happiness. In his forties, he shared with his patients—or at least with me—occasional glimpses of a solid second marriage with his wife, herself a professional woman, and their baby son.

I saw him through the rosy light of positive transference, of course, but I didn’t make it up that he played Bach partitas on the violin between patients. He was my idea of a Renaissance man. I was to see him three times a week for fifty-minute sessions on the couch and once a week for sessions of group therapy for the next ten years. He diagnosed my illness as passive dependency and said, after our initial consultation, “I have a dream for you, Janet. I see us working productively together to get to the bottom of some of these problems that have been troubling you, until you walk out of here one day, a lovely woman, well at ease.” I don’t know about the “lovely” part, but he delivered on the rest big-time, and I was enchanted by his reference to Chaucer’s Criseyde: “I am mine own woman, well at ease.”

It took ten years of work together, but he helped me weave into an integrated self the frayed threads of my troubled childhood in Iowa and the body of experience I found so hard to assimilate in New York. He began by encouraging me to tell it my way, in my own good time. I described a young woman who was not a genius, but who was of better than average intelligence, for whom life was mainly experienced as a snarl of impressions and memories. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in female guise, I moved through the streets of New York, sifting and weighing and organizing the new sensations that were coming swiftly at me from all directions, then attempting to make sense of them. A task as daunting as the creation of a world.
Th
e good doctor helped me to see that a number of aspects of my disintegrated self complicated this attempt.
Th
ey operated like a series of filters between me and my experiences.

One was my shame over my origins in Iowa. Imagine feeling inferiority over a landscape when one has been surrounded in childhood by the richest farmland in the world. Still, measured against the twisted trees and mountain crags of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations in my children’s books, the Disney forests and castles of
Snow White,
the skyscrapers of Manhattan, or the Nevadan deserts and Colorado Rockies of the movies I saw—my only points of geographic reference—northern Iowa looked flat and inferior. But more shameful than that was the position I and my family occupied in our small town.
Th
is was a puzzling mix of better housing but worse moral standing than the families of my cousins and peers.
Th
e mohair sofa and the black upright piano didn’t glean me anything but an occasional accusation of snootiness—and I was, from my earliest appearance on the scene, a hypersensitive social barometer of the impression I was making on those around me. Even harder to bear were the expressions of gleeful pity—the schadenfreude—flitting across the faces of the adults, and the children who mimicked them, over the sight of Father reeling from drink or Mother pretending he was not. I told Dr. Kaplowitz of my preschool habit of crawling under the counter in our family grocery. I could still see myself cowering in the space between the wrapping paper and the string, beneath the cash register. I remembered being perfectly able to see through the three-inch wood and veneer of the countertop to read those faces of public scorn.

Another locus of shame was my unworthy self-image—a gift, unconsciously bestowed, from that loving mother who was a vain, pretty, Irene Dunne look-alike. I believed that she competed with me, her little blond daughter, for Father’s love. Not the reeling, drunken father, but the dashing, charming father, better with people than even she was, because more authentic. Not pretty enough. Not graceful enough. Not nice enough. Just not
enough
to be able to hope for his love. Or that of the boys. Or the men. My insecurity, confusion, conflict, and paralysis of will in dealing with the world was the area Dr. Kaplowitz zeroed in on as the territory we had to work through.
Th
e way it seems to me now, I was always, somewhere deep in my healthy core, a bright, perceptive, sensitive, observant, loving, and lovable human being.
Th
e painfully shy, vain, self-centered, insecure, and rather hateful little girl who grew into me as a teenager and then a young woman was forever masquerading as the former, while in touch only with the hated monster who was always, I was sure, threatened with exposure. Dan Kaplowitz and I worked hard to get those fragmented pieces to coalesce.

Th
en there was the shame of the writer who doesn’t write.
Th
e me who carried within my breast in equal shares the conviction that I could write and the certainty that I could not. Here all the problems of shame over childhood inadequacy and adult insecurity and sexual insecurity and social insecurity ganged up to produce periodic bouts of thwarted attempts. I told Dr. Kaplowitz about the pile of half-filled blue composition books that trailed behind me every place I lived. At this point, Dr. K. deftly turned the table on me. He asked me why, after earning my master’s from NYU in 1968, I was not working toward a doctorate, though he knew what my answer would be—I feared the daunting task of writing a dissertation. When I gave him the answer anyway, he said, “
Th
at’s not being a very good sport, is it?” Which I accepted as the prescription for self-respect that it was.

“You mean,” I asked, “you think I could get a PhD?”

We were standing at his door at the end of a session, always a protean moment. He smiled and said, “Isn’t it about time you did something that was
good
for you?” His suggestion turned out well. I began to substitute for the blue notebooks a second pile of academic accomplishments that I knew to be within my grasp.
Th
irty years of teaching and five volumes on Edmund Wilson stand as something of a tribute to his lucky hit.

We didn’t get everything sorted out in our work together. Even now there are days, just after some rejection or disappointment in my private or professional pursuits, when it feels as if I shall have to begin all over again. But I emerged with a better, more generous acceptance of my Iowa childhood, a clear acknowledgment of my parents’
Menschlichkeit
—that good word that seems to get at the idea of humanness better than the English word
humanity
—and, it could be, the beginnings of my own.

M
R.
R
IGHT
AT
L
AST

A
LBERT AARON LAZAR FIRST
appeared in my life as the evil one, took on physical form as my landlord, and eventually became my husband. Al, owner of the building that housed the cartoonist Evan Simm’s studio on West Fourth Street (the scene of my biblical seduction), was a Pittsburgh-born entrepreneur with multiple interests, among them the manufacture of raffia shoes. He was Evan’s role model for moving through the Village scene with utmost cool, leaving women strewn in his wake, a wife among them. In his early fifties then, Al was tall, trim, a look-alike of Walter Pidgeon, with Pidgeon’s deep voice, cultured, but a touch gruff. (He once admitted to me that he was kind of pleased when, crossing on the
France
in the late 1940s, word circled the ship that he
was
Walter Pidgeon, on his way to California to make a picture with Merle Oberon.)

Al Lazar liked art. Although he barely drank, he was a familiar figure in the Cedar Tavern, where he hung out with the action painters Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. He liked artists of all kinds, writers, painters, actors, and even charlatans. He would buy interesting old buildings in the West Village and rent them at ruinously small sums to such creative types. He preferred it to opening the doors of his charming brownstones to run-of-the mill tenants who might be better business risks.

Evan admired the man’s savoir faire, his air of self-possession, which cut such a wide swath with the ladies. People said that Al was not quite divorced from the millionaire wife who waited with the kids in a Connecticut exurb to bask in his rare presence.
Th
at only increased his stature in Evan’s eyes. He was, in any event, a fixture at the swingingest parties of the sixties. If Ornette Coleman bought an abandoned schoolhouse on the Lower East Side and threw himself a birthday party, Al was there. If the de Koonings and their fellow pioneers in abstract expressionism opened a loft with a keg and a couple of lines in the adjacent john, Al was there. If Andy Warhol and Andy’s girls were at a party come some September night on Watts or Delancey, Al was there—and Andy’s Goth chick, Viva, went home with him. All in all, Al had the mojo Evan craved, and he spoke of him to me in the reverent tones of a hero worshipper. I was royally turned off on all counts—womanizer, wife betrayer, child deserter, partygoer, Viva boinker—and I was having none of it.

By the time I was sold on renting an apartment from Al, on the third-floor rear of his building on West Twelfth, I had such a low opinion of him that I refused to sign the lease unless there was an attorney present.
Th
is broke him up—the transaction involved all of eighty dollars a month, utilities included. We met in 1960, and it would be a good decade before he was more than my landlord. Many years later, Al told me he fell in love with me when I walked into his lawyer’s office on my lunch hour. (It was handily located on Forty-Second Street, just around the corner from
Th
e New Yorker.
) I was wearing black heels, a black-and-white houndstooth coatdress, a black beret, and short white cotton gloves. “I was thunderstruck,” he said. But if he was wooing me then, or in the years that followed, he was so subtle I didn’t know it. He would come by and sit in my narrow sunporch, having a cup of coffee and passing the time of day. He asked a great many questions about where I came from and how I liked it there and how I liked it here, but I thought he was just being a very nice landlord.

One by one, all of Evan’s bad knocks against Al got erased by the facts or, if not erased, certainly mitigated. He did not abandon a wife; they’d divorced several years earlier. He did not desert his children; they were in his apartment weekly and on his lips always (for they were bright boys, and their accomplishments were many). He did admit to seeing a zonked-out Viva home one night, but he was so full of compassion for her as a lost person, it didn’t seem to qualify as exploitation of women. In 1964, when I was still grieving over the loss of Fritz, Al lent me his house on the Vineyard for a week to salve my broken heart.
Th
e next year, when I expressed the desire to go into retreat, he lent me his A-frame in Connecticut for a month, dropping off what he dubbed a housewarming bottle of champagne. By the time I returned from Oxford in 1966, he was calling now and then with tickets to the opera or a Mozart concert or a suggestion that Nina Simone was at the Vanguard and he was pretty sure I’d like her. When he found out I’d never seen a horse race, he piled me into his 1964 red Mustang and off we went to Belmont Park.

Th
e irony was that in 1970, just when I began to realize he was much more to me than a nice landlord, Al said we’d probably better not see each other anymore. He knew that I wanted to marry and have children. I should do that. I’d be good at it. He just had to be truthful and say he’d been there and done that. So I took myself off to a new apartment in Yorkville, and it was 1975, the year my father died
(
pace
Freud), before I saw him again.

Ever obliging, I spent the interval looking for Mr. Right. My new buddies at Saint Peter’s Lutheran were most attentive. I saw shows, went to dinner, stayed out of bed, and in general behaved myself.
Th
ere was a biologist, a stockbroker, an ad man, and a minister who came and went without incident. Oddly, there was another German, too. Kurt was a divorced political science professor who taught at a large nearby university and was looking for a stepmother for his seven-year-old son, the apple of his eye. (I have changed his name and that of his son here.)
Th
e boy’s mother was carrying on a passionate affair with the man of the hour in left-wing circles, one of those beating the drum for a War on Poverty. But the little boy was not getting the attention his father thought he deserved. After several weeks of wining and dining me and making me a gift of the complete Mozart symphonies—with Leinsdorf conducting—Kurt asked me to come up to his ex-wife’s house on the New England shore. It was right on the water, and he thought we could try out our fit as a family. But it was a disaster.
Th
e little boy, accustomed to entering his dad’s bedroom whenever he wakened in the middle of the night, did so and discovered the beast with two backs. Kurt was horrified. He made me remove myself to the guest bedroom immediately, while little Christopher was taken into the paternal arms for comfort. Even if there had been no such mischance, however, I had the sense to see it was a no-go.

When I came back from my father’s funeral in 1975 and was moping around with no future husband in sight, Al called to say that he’d seen my review of Edmund Wilson’s
Th
e Twenties
in the Catholic intellectual periodical
Commonweal.
He’d been going through some of the magazines and journals in the Vineyard Haven Public Library, and there I was! He’d read it and liked what I wrote. He’d just come down to the city for the rest of the winter. Was I, by any chance, free for dinner? I was. With twice the twelve years between us my parents had boasted, we two had all the makings of a classic May-December love. I have always had a weakness for “September Song”—and so it came about that after many a year searching and not finding, at the age of thirty-nine, in a man old enough to be my father, I finally found a guy I could trust. He was all the hard-to-find qualities I’d sought for combined. Knowing how rare a combination it was, I was loath to let a little thing like one score and four stand in my way.
Th
e elusive traits? Sober, sexy, self-assured, sensitive, and—to get out of the
s
’s—brilliant, his own man, capable of independent thought, no slave to capitalism or orthodoxy or any of the structures he was born into, making a place for himself in the world that he could comfortably be himself in. All that, and he loved opera, too.

When Al said anything, he conveyed the sense that his words were coming from a man who had earned them.
Th
e list of constraints on his freedom was the list of things he had successfully broken from, beginning with his Orthodox father’s expectation that his first and only identity was to be a good Jew. By the time I met him, Al was thoroughly assimilated. He told me he had spent the better part of his youth divesting himself—“freeing” himself, as he put it—of that identity, not from blasphemous rejection of its tenets or in loathing recoil from its burdensome stereotypes, but as a necessary precondition for finding himself.
Th
at done, he wore the badge lightly, often citing the British neurosurgeon–artistic director Jonathan Miller’s answer to the “What religion are you?” line on his army questionnaire. In Al’s telling, it was “I’m not a Jew—but I am Jew-ish.”

Free of his father, Al spent the next forty years rejecting the other external pressures he’d felt, to be a certain way, look or sound a certain way, conform to a certain set of rules or expectations. He had made his way through Harvard College and found that his love of literature did not reconcile him to the prospect of life in the ivory tower. Upon finishing Harvard Law School, he felt a similar reluctance to enter a life spent practicing law. In the end, he left the academic halls with the spirit of
Th
oreau at the core of his being. He became a sayer of no.

Al had seen brutal things in the war, which contributed to his strength. When I gave him my trust, I relied not just on what I knew of Al’s having earned the right to his self-knowledge but on what I knew of his regard for women. He wasn’t flashy about it. He just went out of his way to treat me and every woman he met with his full interest and attention. On the matter of the battle of the sexes, it was rich how one-sided our setup was. Al walked away with the win before I even took the field. His preemptive strike was twofold.

When we began to spend time exclusively with each other—in the summer of 1976—he said apropos of nothing one day, “No talk about ‘relationships,’ understood?” I think I did have the presence of mind to ask, “Why?”

“It’s a waste of time,” he said. “
Th
e existentialists have it right. Whatever is the case, is. No amount of talk is going to change it.
Th
e only thing we have to feel responsible for to each other is to pay attention to what’s happening between us. It either is or it isn’t.”

So be it,
I thought. Like all of Al’s life rules, it sounded a lot easier than it was.

Still, there was one transcendent morning in the house on the Vineyard that I would not trade for all the relationship talk in the world. It was early morning, and after making love in Al’s old maple bed, we lay, not talking, in each other’s arms. I could hear the leaves rustle in the window just above our heads.
Th
e morning sun sent a golden shaft across us from the east. I had the strong sensation of being in a tough, lacelike, open net, suspended over the void. Utterly at risk, yet utterly secure. It was a new sensation for me.
Th
is,
I thought,
is what it feels like to feel loved.
Like Dickens’s Little Dorrit, I had been unable to believe I could be. Now, with no declarations of any kind on his part, and knowing there would be none, with Al, I believed.

Later that day we were lying on the beach, and the second of Al’s rules to live by came down. Al, as usual, in the altogether, and me in my yellow two-piece. He was on a large bath sheet, and I on my favorite beach towel, a long rectangle of royal blue with a border of melon, lemon, navy, and chartreuse.
Th
e Red Sox were ahead of the Yankees, six–zip, in the bottom of the ninth—this was good because we were Red Sox fans, Al since his Harvard days, and I since being with Al—when he reached over and turned the game off.

“If we’re going to be going on as we seem to be, I need to make a few things clear about what you should expect. I guess I mean what you should not expect,” he said. He was trying to sound offhand, but I know an important moment when I hear one. I was all ears.

“
Th
e biggest thing,” he went on, “is that I will never do anything to please you. I mean, I don’t expect or want to do anything to displease you. But I will never do anything at all just because you want me to do it.”

I was stunned as I tried to hold on to the huge difference that had just opened up between us. I was, every minute we were together, bending every fiber of my being into the shape or response that I thought would please him. It now occurred to me with blinding clarity that I had been doing that with every man I’d known from the moment I’d lain in Daddy’s arms and he’d read to me about “Bye, Baby Bunting” in the big double bed in Saint Ansgar.

How was this to be? Not to live to please the man? Whom, then, to please? Something I had, on occasion, felt stirring in me in Dr. Kaplowitz’s office was given a new lease on life that day.
Th
e idea of an autonomous me. It was in 1976, toward the end of our work together, that I lay on the couch in Dan Kaplowitz’s office and said, “Al says, ‘Women are just as good as men,’ and then he says, ‘And it’s not men’s fault that women don’t know that.’ How do you like them apples?”
Th
e good doctor did not hesitate: “Hold on to that guy,” he said.

Here I am reminded of Dr. Kaplowitz’s assessment as we parted. It was my last appointment before leaving New York. “You have made a lot of progress,” he said. “You have worked hard. I think you have largely resolved your conflicts with your father. Probably allowing Al into your life has helped you with that. As my old mentor at the Menninger Clinic used to say, ‘We are all of us searching for a perfect family. Sometimes we substitute material things, but often in the friendships we form, the lovers we take, the mates we marry, we are arranging for ourselves the understanding mother, the good father, the loving brother and sister we yearn for, the things we missed in our own.’ ”